Thought is Metaphor

We like to think that the things we experience every day are hard cold reality. It's a lie.

Remember Newton's 3 laws of motion? Newton's 3 laws of motion are pretty much infallible when it comes to every day life. Yes, apples always fall when you drop them.

Enter Einstein and his theory of relativity. It turns out that at really high speeds, Newton's laws don't work quite right. They're really an approximation that only works in our little corner of reality.

Newton's laws are metaphor. Science is metaphor.

What is art? It is an attempt by the artist to take an idea in his head and make that idea into reality. The quality of the art is based on how well the artist can convert his idea into reality. The simple fact is that the art work is not the idea. It is only an approximation of the idea.

Art is metaphor.

Further examination will lead to the conclusion that all thought is metaphor. Metaphor is like an asymptotic equation. The authors of metaphor wish to make their metaphor as close to reality as possible. Einstein's theory of relativity get's closer to reality than Newton's did, but it still does not reach reality. Thought gets closer and closer to reality, but never reaches reality.

When does metaphor thought and reality become one?

More on Alfresco

Yesterday I had a chance to play around some more with Alfresco.

I figured that if I was going to use this to manage all our documents I ought to try it to manage my own first and see how it goes. So I took my entire directory tree of Crossroads stuff (OpenOffice documentsm, MS Office documents, Gimp files, Blender files, PDFs, jpgs, pngs, etc.) and stuck them in Alfresco.

What I did was mount my Alfresco area in my home directory using smbfs. I then recursively copied the files (cp -r c3/* .) to this new file-system.

Let me just say that this took a very very long time. I gave Alfresco the benefit of the doubt since I know that at the same time it was indexing all these documents – which can be a very intensive process.

Then I figured that I'd use it for a while and see how it went. I brought up Nautilus (similar to Window Explorer for you non-Linux people) and discovered that not only does this file-system act very sluggish, but it also pegs out the CPU every time you access the file system. I can't imagine putting an office of 10 people on this thing and letting them go at it. The CPU would be pegged all day. People would not tolerate the sluggishness.

Unless I'm doing something dreadfully wrong, this feature is simply unusable.  Oddly, this is one of the features that Alfresco really promotes as being one of the key features that differentiate it from other products. At this point I'm not convinced.

Dead Puppies

This is demented, but good for a laugh. Very Pythonesque.
Dead Puppies

Web Design Guages

In our last meeting for Crossroads' web design process, we discussed Andy Stanley's 3 questions (see Web Design Team Process). These questions are in fact gauges for knowing evaluating what you have produced. Think of each question as something akin to a speedometer or tachometer.

You need to find your own gauges. We decided that Stanley's gauges were a very good starting point, but that we should refine them just a bit for our circumstances. Our strategy follows Northpoint's strategy of creating irresistible environments. We have a tendency to use Granger's terminology of "Next Steps." So we're trying to create environments in which people are more likely to take their next step toward Christ – be that coming to Crossroads for the first time, joining a small group, or any other step.

So, the gauges we established are:

• Does it look nice?
• Does it draw you in? (i.e. does it cause a click?)
• Is it a step?

The key is to keep things simple and not do anything that doesn't end up being a yes for each of these questions. We hope to reduce the noise.

We also discussed pre-production vs. post-production gauges. Essentially, the gauges are the same, but answering the questions takes a different method. In pre-production, deciding if some feature will cause a click is a matter of educated guessing. In post-production we can measure visit length from our site statistics.

Open Source Ministry

Lifechurch.tv is giving away content for free! This includes message outlines, graphics, video, etc. This is how it should be!

I don't want to knock all the big providers of this type of content (Crossroads uses a lot of content from Saddleback, Fellowship, Northpoint, and others). They put a lot of resources into developing some very good content. But just imagine if Paul had charged for his epistles? Where would we be today?

This is truly in the spirit of the New Testament church. In fact, Paul encouraged those he sent letters to to share them with other churches. We are all on the same team and this is a tremendous ministry.

Bravo Lifechurch!

Linux on a Mac

This story is unusual. Usually you hear stories of people migrating from Windows to Linux. Here’s an interesting story of a teacher reformatting all her classroom Macs and migrating to Linux.

Link: Switching art students to GNU/Linux

(We Linux people are hardware agnostic. Buy what you want. We’ll run Linux on it.)

Happy Anniversary

Today is the one year anniversary of my blog.

ajaxWrite

Here’s the latest Ajax style wordprocessor. The company is planning to release an entire web-based office suite. At this point it is free.

I’m a curious sort of person, so I had to look a little deeper and see how they were doing this. It turns out that this is XUL based. For those who don’t know what XUL (pronounced zool) is, it is the XML based markup language that Firefox uses for all its user interfaces (including extensions). In other words, this application will run in Firefox only.

Bye Bye Microsoft Word, Hello ajaxWrite

What would be cool, is if this type of application were available for installation on local servers. It would be the ultimate in easy deployment.

Typepad

OK. Now I’m spending the big bucks so I can have my old blog automatically send everyone here (hopefully Google will follow the meta refresh tags). Typepad’s templates editing feature is very powerful, but very cumbersome and very expensive at $15/month. Two months at that rate will certainly add up quick, but in the long run save me money.

Bye-bye Typepad.

Web Design Team Process

The Crossroads web design team is having our second session tonight. We are going at this very deliberately and carefully. The first 3 sessions are nothing but training. We are a purpose driven church, and while we continue to stay purpose driven, much of our current and future strategy is shaped by Northpoint Church’s strategy. Our outline for the first 4 sessions is:

1. watch and discuss Andy Stanley’s video, From Foyer to Kitchen about creating irresistable environments. Further, learn and discuss the communications strategy that Pete Bishop has developed. (March 8 )
2. watch and discuss a video from Northpoint on the 3 questions to ask when creating any type of media or content. (see Questions) (March 22).
3. present and discuss Seth Godin’s web design book Knock Knock. (April 12)
4. discuss our target audience – who they are, what they’re looking for, what we want them to do when they see our site, etc. (April 26).

Incidently, I’m discovering that Basecamp rules.

WordPress

I got to wondering why I pay $6/month for Typepad when there are other good services out there that do nearly the same thing for free. So I thought I’d check out WordPress and what do you know? I actually like it better and it’s free.

Hey, maybe I should go out to lunch with my $6…

Alfresco, Plone, and KnowledgeTree

Call me wishy-washy.

After playing with Plone for a while, I have decided that while it is cool, it may not work out for us. Purportedly, it will do document conversions using OpenOffice running in the background on the server. I have not been unsuccessful in making this happen and I’ve seen a lot of comments from others with similar results. There is little to no documentation on making this work. Work is ongoing on a new add-on to make this work much easier.

So… I downloaded Alfresco to see how easy it was to get going. It’s certainly not as easy to install as Plone. All I had to do for Plone is click a button in Synaptic and voila, there it was. Rumor has it that Alfresco may eventually make it into one of the Ubuntu Apt repositories. That would be very cool. Since Alfresco is Java 1.5 based, I had to download and install Java. Then I had to twiddle a few config files.

I still haven’t gotten the CIFS (i.e. SMB) stuff working (I suspect a conflict with my Samba server). However, the OpenOffice integration is brilliant. I can set up a rule in a folder to automatically convert a .doc or .odt file to a PDF (or HTML, jpg, etc.) automatically in the background. And there are a gazillion different conversions possible. In theory I could mount Alfresco as a shared drive and then simply copy a document to the drive and have it auto-magically produce a corresponding PDF file. This is very cool. Or I could have that PDF file show up in a different directory and have an email automatically sent to somebody notifying them that a file has been dropped in that directory. There are a lot of other work-flow possibilities.

Like the other packages (i.e. Plone and KnowledgeTree), you can then have discussions about the files (similar to a blog). Plone is a little better on this than the others. It is more complete in terms of acting as a web content management system. You can add wikis, blogs, and various other modules. Alfresco seems to be very sharply focused on doing internal document management very well. It’s not really for doing web pages.

I’m still not a huge fan of Alfresco’s Web based UI, but it seems to be a very robust application. With a little work toward using some Ajax techniques, it could become much better. It seems a little sluggish at this point (I’m running both the server and my browser on a dual-core Athlon 3800+ with 2GB memory).

Alfresco also has a non-open-source component. The open-source portion does not support management of people in groups. This is a big problem, but rumor has it that the entire thing will be going open-source soon.

I really liked KnowledgeTree’s UI, but since it will not have the shared drive capabilities for a while yet it is out of the running at this point. The shared drive capability will be available in beta form sometime very soon, but it will not be open-source and I haven’t yet seen pricing.

All three have commercial support available. Alfresco and KnowledgeTree are supported by the companies behind the products. Plone support is a little less well defined, but can be found. I have a tendency not to purchase support from companies because I can usually figure things out on my own when I have the source (but I do tend to contribute back to the project as well). Others may find support necessary.

I may actually end up using both Plone and Alfresco. I actually like Plone better than Joomla for web content management.

How Not to Treat a Company Rep

After my previous post on Alfresco and "How not to Treat a Customer," I received an apology from the gentlemen from whom I received the "offending" email. I also received an email from the company founder that very nicely explained things.

I re-read the email with my mind open to the intentions the author said he had and could see that, yes, he probably meant it in jest. For that reason I have deleted the previous post. Unfortunately, when you post something on a blog, it’s really not possible to ever get it back. It’s probably stuck out on bloglines now and who knows where else.

I apologize for being a bit too sensitive (something I always accuse others of being). Political Correctness is something that drives me nuts and now I’ve gone and done it myself.

The moral of the story is three-fold:

1. Don’t be too sensitive. Try to read email and take it with a grain of salt. Many of the visual cues that you get in face-to-face communication are missing from email. Always confirm intent before going off on a rampage.
2. Be very very careful when crafting email to people. It is very easy to say something in jest and have it be taken way too seriously.
3. Be very very careful when blogging. It’s impossible to put the cork back into the bottle.

I will reaffirm that Alfresco is a tremendously powerful and flexible product. At this time I’ve decided to follow the Plone path, but you never know, I may reconsider Alfresco someday in the future.

Getting a Grip on Groups

I’ll be going to Granger Community Church on Monday (March 20) for Getting a Grip on Groups. If any of you happen to be there be sure to look me up.

Norton Anti-Virus

Since my last comment on my distaste for Windows, there seems to be a consensus that Norton Anti-Virus is crap. I’ve tried McAfee and thought that was worse (though that was a few years back). I’ve tried AntiVir, which I didn’t like at all. I’m currently trying out Avast on one test system.

What do others suggest I use for anti-virus instead of Norton? Kaspersky?

Tapes Reveal WMD Plans

Liberals have repeatedly accused President Bush of lying about Saddam seeking out Uranium from Africa. Heretofore unrevealed evidence now indicates that he was not lying.

Link: Tapes reveal WMD plans by Saddam�-�Nation/Politics�-�The Washington Times, America’s Newspaper.

Windows Sucks

I just spent 3 hours messing with Norton anti-virus software and Windows. Let’s just say that if Windows were eradicated from the earth 2 years ago it wouldn’t be soon enough for me.

ϖ Day

Since I work for the Amerian Mathematical Society I feel it is my duty to alert everyone that tomorrow is ϖ day. It is 3/14. The correct time to celebrate ϖ day is at 1:59am (i.e. 3/14 1:59). For those of you who will be celebrating at the correct time, I’ll wish an early happy ϖ day. I’ll be peacefully asleep.

We are Experiencing Technical Difficulties…

Sunday morning was a bummer.

I got to church at 7:00am as usual to set up the check-in kiosks. I got them all setup and turned them on. No network.

I fired up my Ubuntu laptop and checked the network. I connected to the access point and could ping internal stuff, but couldn’t get to the outside world. I panicked.

Our network was setup by the staff at the facility we lease, so I don’t even know where the physical hardware is located and don’t have a key. I couldn’t even get in contact with the facility IT guy. I pulled out the info he emailed me on the various access points and the modem. I managed to connect to the modem and rebooted it. Voila! Network.

Next I started up the Fellowship One check-in program on the kiosks, but it wouldn’t take my activity code. Neither could I log into the Fellowship One portal. I called Fellowship Tech, sure enough, they were having technical difficulties. I then warned my wife Shari (the Children’s Ministry director) to prepare for a paper check-in process. They finally came up in time for our 9:00am service experience.

We got about 20 people checked in and then weird things started to happen. I called Fellowship Tech. The machine that was having problems earlier was trying to go back down again. They were trying to force it to stay up to finish check-in. Apparently they failed because we finally ended up using paper.

They finally got it back up between services. We were able to do a smooth check-in for the 11:00am experience. Unfortunately, when we went to print the rosters that we give to the teachers, the reports came up empty. I called FT. They didn’t know anything about it, but put in a support ticket for me. About 10:55am I ran the report again and it worked!

I could be evil and claim that these problems were because Fellowship One runs on Windows, but I won’t. Problems like this are operating system agnostic. Anthony Coppedge was visiting Crossroads and asked how something like this could happen given the multiple redundant systems that Fellowship Tech has in place.

I recall the Mars explorer having a software problem. It was a memory leak that caused a cycle of reboots as memory would fill and then trigger a reboot. NASA miraculously uploaded a patch and fixed it. I had a friend who said a bug like that was inexcusable in such a mission critical system. I say that the best laid plans of mice and men fail. There is always one more bug. No matter how many redundant systems you have in place, some key component will fail and your whole house of cards will come tumbling down. It happens to the best of us.

But given Jason’s story, I somehow have to wonder if some sort of spiritual warfare was going on Sunday. There were other stories of technical failures at Crossroads on Sunday. (e.g. The projector in the auditorium somehow lost sync and the image kept slowly shifting to the left). I wouldn’t put it past the forces of evil to stage a massive attack in many places of worship across the country on Sunday. Why this Sunday in particular? I don’t know. But the devil usually has his reasons.

 

Fellowship One Service

As regular readers know, I’ve been using Fellowship One Data Exchange a lot lately. I was having difficulty making something work the way I needed it to so I submitted a suggestion for a change in the API via the support facility of the Fellowship One portal. In less than 1 day I had an email back from Nick Floyd (the Data Exchange developer) that my suggestion had been implemented, QAed, tested and deployed! Unbelievable! Now that’s service.

ArcWeb

As promised, I am releasing my ArcWeb Perl code. Consider this version 0.1. There is no documentation, just an example script. I’m not using even 10% of the features of ArcWeb. It’ll suffice for some quick mash-ups or simply doing geocoding. There is no international support yet (since I don’t need it).

I’m using the BSD license except for one file I stole from Rosso World, which appears to be public domain.

Download ArcWeb.zip

Maybe someday this will make it to CPAN.

Document Management

One of the goals I have for my work at Crossroads this year is to develop a strong disaster recovery plan. Obviously our church database will not be a part of this plan since FellowshipTech takes care of all that for us. However, there are still numerous other types of data (e.g. spreadsheets, documents, graphics, etc.) that need attention.

The common way to keep all of this information backed up is to simply have a server upon which everyone stores the files that they want backed up. Lately I’ve been looking into somewhat more sophisticated systems for doing just that. I’d like to see support for version control, search-ability, work-flow, and discussions.

At this point it looks like there are 3 major options.

• an in-house managed system – I’ve been looking at 3 different systems – Plone, KnowledgeTree, and Alfresco.
• a hosted office suite – this morning I discovered Writely (recently purchased by Google), NumSum, and ThinkFree Office.
• a hosted document management system – A good example appears to be Spring CM.

I’d appreciate feedback on any of these systems. I also welcome comments and suggestions on where to head with this.

IBM Isn’t Dumping Windows

Well, it seems that my previous post was premature. However, my father-in-law’s comments were definitly interesting. I believe much of his work – while done on a Windows desktop – actually takes place on either mainframes or AIX boxen. People who use mainframe applications will be relatively easy to convert.

Given IBM’s strong support for Linux, I believe it’s only a matter of
time. My suspicion is that they weren’t ready to release this info yet
and it accidently leaked. They’re now trying to put the cow back in the
barn. Only time will tell.

Link: CRN | Operating Systems, Open Source | IBM Switches Linux Desktops, But Isn’t Dumping Windows.

Intelligent Design

I work in Ann Arbor, which is a bastion of secular and liberal thinking. The University of Michigan is located right here and is known for its secular and liberal leanings. That’s why it is extremely good to hear about these 3 UofM professors stepping out on a limb like this.

Link: Pondering the complexity of life’s beginnings.

IBM will not use Windows Vista

According to this article, IBM has cancelled its contract with Microsoft as of October of this year. They will be moving to all Linux desktops.

Link: IBM will not use Windows Vista – but will move to Linux desktops – Neoseeker News Article.

My father-in-law is an IBM employee and has confirmed that everyone is supposed to be moved to Linux on the desktop in the near future.

I’m guessing there’s a fairly significant direct loss from this for Microsoft, but the bigger loss will likely come from other companies following IBM’s lead.